Jubilee

Best known in the U.S. as the author of The Story of English , McCrum, who is editorial director of Faber & Faber in London, has written several novels that barely made their way here. His new one is accomplished: smoothly written, artfully constructed and infused with a real sense of the hollow posturing at the heart of so much of public life. Narrator Sam Gilchrist, a speechwriter for President Carter, lives an uneasily transatlantic existence: his father, Admiral Lefevre, is a retired British admiral who was a bigwig in the Secret Service; his mother, after their divorce, returned to her home in America. (Angry at his father, Sam has adopted his mother's maiden name.) Sam's life is disintegrating along with the Carter administration; and both the sexy Australian journalist with whom he is deceiving his wife, and a mysterious, rather pathetic Scots army officer, who had known his father in Northern Ireland, seem convinced that Admiral Lefevre had been involved in some sort of attempted Whitehall coup. Gradually the reader is drawn into Sam's dilemma about his father as each new foray into the past brings fresh evidence to light. The territory, and something of the polished manner, are very much in the le Carre vein, but McCrum simply doesn't know that world well enough to make it entirely convincing. Still, Admiral Lefevre is a splendid creation, and anyone in search of a highly intelligent suspense novel with unexpected layers of emotion will find it thoroughly involving and satisfying. (June)